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Notice

George Plimpton

Issue 150, Spring 1999

Two numbers, like converging planets on an astrologist’s chart, have cropped up this year that have invited editorial notice here—the fact that this is the 45th year of the magazine’s existence and also that this issue is number 150. True, the numbers are not round, like a 100th birthday, or the millennium 2000, or the Dow’s 10,000 level, but in our minds they are considered felicitous enough for us to put together a celebratory issue. We have done this sort of thing in the past. The 100th issue (Summer-Fall 1986, a cover by Frank Stella) included among its 416 (!) pages one of Ezra Pound’s early short stories, a Mary McCarthy memoir on her early schooling, Gertrude Stein’s letters of advice and support to a young writer named Wilcox, poems by forty nine(!) poets, and a missing section of Czeslaw Milosz’s From the Rising of the Sun. The 40th anniversary (Fall 1993, 392 pages, cover by Larry Rivers) had as its lagniappe a number of interesting documents... Ezra Pound’s confession to a m…